


The Language of a Subtler Magic

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: AU, Canon Divergence, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-19
Updated: 2013-06-19
Packaged: 2017-12-15 12:03:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/849346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU: young Dr. Frankenstein, working at the local asylum, is tasked with the puzzle of a strange man who came to the hospital bleeding, sick, and babbling about rabbits and time.  A meeting, a beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Language of a Subtler Magic

I.

The Hatter doesn't know where he is.

When he stirs in darkness, feeling manhandled and moth eaten, the magic in his body cries out for some familiar beacon, and finds nothing. 

Usually, he is merely _not sure_ where he is. But nearly every world he's fallen into has some logic, some rhythm that connects it to the deeper magic, that what isn't done but _felt_ by all things alive - 

The magic in his body courses, weakly, into the dark. Fluttering away from him. A fragile bird. 

The Hatter is alone in a small dark place, listening to the animal cries of broken men.

He doesn't know where he is, and shivers.

II.

Victor was not sure what to do with himself.

Dr. von Bleeker had chased him from the morgue and sent out strict orders for him not to be allowed back into Pathology until shift change.

"You're a young man," the doctor had said, "you ought to spend a little more time with the living. Plenty of time to see this wretched flesh, boy, believe me, they won't go anywhere." Spiked with a curt laugh, as von Bleeker peered through his pince-nez glasses at the man he was stitching back up after his autopsy.

And so Victor - only recently graduated from the university, a doctor, it still felt strange to use such a title of himself. Particularly here at the asylum he felt as if he would be mistaken for some wandering patient at any moment, and he kept the buttons of his high-collared coat buttoned firmly, hands tight in his pockets, clutching his new stethoscope. He tried to stride the halls as if he belonged there, skirting the wards themselves, listening to the groans and shouts and mad, high laughter beyond each double-set of doors.

The asylum was supposed to be very modern, with all the latest scientific knowledge being set to work to bring the insane to, at least, trainability, pliability. The more lucid patients worked in the laundry, the kitchen, the vocational shops. There was even a farm with cultivated land, a dairy, and a slaughterhouse. Victor's superiors called this moral treatment, that good hard work was the key, surely.

Victor had looked into the eyes of some patients, though, and he had seen desperation behind the glassiness, behind the grimy, groping hands. Something there wanted to connect, and couldn't. 

He spent a lot of time with Doctor von Bleeker in the basement with his bodies and specimens in glass and jars.

But now he was pacing the wings, hands in his pockets, nothing of consequence to do and frustrated by the thoughts swirling in his head.

"Doctor Frankenstein!" 

"Yes doctor." He turned at once and it was old Wildebrand, a canny fellow that Victor rather admired among the staff.

"Young doctor, I heard you've been sent up to the land of the living. Such a treat."

"Yes, doctor."

"Tell you what, you're so fond of puzzles. Why don't you go up to men's disturbed, and see what you can make of this particular case..."

III.

Jefferson did not have a window. 

He did not have his hat.

He did not have any of his clothes, only a thin, loose pair of pants and a thin, loose shirt of the same rough-cut fabric. They did not fit well. Jefferson had been to places far and near enough to understand that fit was not the concern, not in a place like this.

He was still not _sure_ where he was, but felt it was an improvement over the darkness, where he did not know at all.

Jefferson did not like the little room with the bare stone floor and the bare walls and no window to even tell him if it was day or night outside. And magic. He could not, no matter how he shut his eyes and strained his being, find and grasp the lay-lines of whatever world this was. He could not seize the map in his mind, of where he was, and how to find his way home. He would try and his head would throb and once he had done it so fiercely he'd passed out, and woke to find his head bleeding again and his mind wretched in pieces, hanging by threads.

Jefferson lay on the floor often. His room had a door. Now and then someone pushed a metal tray through it, and if he pulled himself together enough to count and note what the food was, he had some idea of the time of day, of when he should sleep, of what the world around him might be doing.

No one ever opened the door. 

He lay on the floor and he closed his eyes and reached again, and again, for the fires of the magic he knew must lie somewhere - however subtle - in every world. The Hat had told him this. Everywhere. Even in the places where there was no magic as they knew it in the Forest, there would be some of a certain kind. He reached.

The door clicked.

IV.

There were two keepers, attendants, on duty on the men's disturbed wing. They were burly, surly fellows with flat reddened faces like bulldogs and sets of many large, forbidding looking keys. One of them had blood on his uniform. Neither of them looked pleased to see him.

Victor wondered if he should check with them. There were supposed to be rules about that, but Victor didn't like the look of the two of them, or the blood on the one's shirt. They glanced at him, from behind their half-walled station, but only barely, nodding him along. 

The corridor was long and dim, lit by three fluttering incandescent lamps down the ceiling, and one grimy window at the far end. The wooden floors, waxed to gleaming and stained darkly here and there, cricked softly beneath his footsteps. Shut, locked doors on either side of them - now and then one was open, and a man might be sitting, talking to himself, weeping, or simply lying silent. From beyond a locked door came a keening wail, frantic shouts, _get them off get them off getthemoffgetthemoff -_

Victor wanted to go back to the brains in the jars, and the hearts on the scales.

These were _men_ , living, once-lucid men.

He looked for the door. Wildebrand had given him the number, D-22, and he passed eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, and then at last there was 22, bolted in brass to the heavy door, which was not locked - but cracked open just-so.

Victor thought he should knock. 

The door eased open, groaning on stiff hinges.

The man in the little room looked - 

Ordinary. Appallingly, viscerally ordinary, in hospital pajamas, sitting on a bare mattress and looking up at him with the clearest eyes Victor had seen on any patient. Ordinary - hair tousled, scruffy around the edges, and yet giving Victor a distinct, crawling sensation that he simply _did not belong_. As if, like a scent or a shadow, something clung to him, something ephemeral and not of this place. 

Victor did not like it. He could not measure it, quantify it, whatever it was.

He could only look this man in the eye.

"Hello," he said. "I'm Doctor Frankenstein."

V.

In the days when he had first slipped the barriers between the worlds, he had been so arrogant as to believe their laws did not apply to him, to his form, to his self.

But some things were universal.

Like pain.

Jefferson had broken flesh and bones, had been exiled and captive, and the worlds left their marks on him and he kept them into his own.

This was a world he had not been to before. He had dreamed of it - it had come to him, in a fever-sleep, as all worlds did, baring their teeth as animals might which have scented blood on the far-off wind - and it had haunted him for days. 

Jefferson had learned you didn't fight the dreams, didn't ever cross the magic that whispered to you, brought the sweat to your brow and beneath your back. Jefferson had opened the door, and stepped into this place, trusting his purpose to resolve itself.

He should not have trusted, he thinks. He shouldn't have trusted the damned magic or the twice-damned hat. The door - the very real, and mostly very locked door - of his little room had opened twice. Once, to put him in. And a second time, for a brawny man with fists like beef shoulders to beat him half-senseless and whisper something about a _doctor_ , something that the whispering of the grounding magic in him translated simultaneously as _butcher_ and _hope_. 

You didn't ever cross the whispering magic.

He sat up before the door opened.

 _Rabbit,_ came the thought unbidden - it was probably not his thought, but it was hard, sometimes, to discern what he thought from what he knew from what the world knew that it was trying to tell him.

Rabbit. Rabbit of this world. Yes, it's him. Yes, this one. 

Doctor. Butcher.

"Hello," the man says. He has a white coat that comes to his knees and buttons up his throat to his chin. The buttons are large and silver and imprinted with something; they gleam. "I'm Doctor Frankenstein."

"Victor," Jefferson says. Because he _knows_ , jolted suddenly. Victor, that's the man's name, and he's the Rabbit, the one in every world that Jefferson must find, the key to the boundary, the key to the whispers. Jefferson can feel it inside his head, buzzing in his teeth. He stands up, lurching, unsteady from the beating. Says it again: "Victor."

The man is staring at him. In unguarded panic. The coat and the buttons mean something important, they mean power and privilege, but the man is young and the shock shows all over him, in his face and in his stance.

Jefferson reaches out for him, "Please, I - "

But the instant his fingers brush the clean white coat, the man - Victor - Doctor - backs up and shuts the door hard. 

Jefferson can feel the vibration of his fear all over him.

Can feel _him_ , and he has the queasy sense that if he'd actually touched his skin, he might've slid into his mind entirely.

He remembers that happening before. Just once. In a place where magic was captured and pinned with gears and brass, where souls lived outside the body in animal forms. Jefferson's own spirit had fluttered out of him in a dream and when he woke she was there beside him, a shining raven with searing eyes.

Jefferson had met that world's rabbit, a man whose daemon was, of all things, a fox.

They had shared an adventure on a river in a wild land. They had shared a bed. When they touched Jefferson could see the inside of his mind as if it were a landscape unto itself. When they made love in the dark, their daemons played and groomed and Jefferson felt as if he was the earth and sky itself.

But all rabbits make the wolves to howl and the hounds to bay, and soldiers when soldiers killed the rabbit - 

(not his name don't think his name don't)

\- the burst of light, the daemon gone to sparks on the wind - 

\- that feeling of being wrenched out of joint - 

He had got out. He had found the gate back again, in all his grief. He had resurfaced in his own world, half-mad with his own interminable capacity for pleasure and for agony. Crazed with the awful feeling that something had been _cut_ from him, something he could not repair, he carved a raven from a scrap of wood, and lay in bed a week with fever, fingers clutching the little totem, staining it with sweat.

Victor was the rabbit.

Victor didn't know it.

Jefferson sat back down on the mattress in the little room without the window, compressed all his energy into the tightest ball he could manage, deep inside his chest, compressed and shaped until it glowed to his mind like an eye.

Come back, he thought. Come back. 

VI.

The shrieks and moans of the insane were all around him. It was like a kind of music, and he heard it now. As if the lunatic's voice had touched off something inside his mind. 

_Victor._

He stared at the heavy door, at the brass hinges and latch, at the scratches deep in the stain. Surely, surely this man had only guessed. Surely, surely perhaps he had heard the name somewhere spoken.

Victor touched the door, so briefly. There was an undercurrent of something humming in his teeth, not unlike when he switched on the electrics in the laboratory at his father's house. That thought again - that the man, the lunatic, within that tiny room was somehow not of this place.

It was a mad thought, that was. Priests might speak of angels and saints, but this Jefferson was only an ordinary lunatic, with blood on his lips and knuckles, real blood, human blood. What other place could he even be from? There was one place. This country, this land, this earth.

It was a mad thought, to look at him, at his bright and striking eyes, and feel the sense that he should _know_ this man. 

That sense was crawling on him, dragging his fingers toward the latch again - 

Victor dropped his hand at once to his side, took a breath, and backed away. He strode back down the hallway ignoring the itch at the back of his mind. There was no itch. There was the body, flesh and blood and bone, and if his theories were correct, a mass of electrical impulses within, thousands upon thousands that told breath to quicken and heart to beat and hair to rise on the back of the neck. Mere impulses of the flesh. 

He had been sharing such thoughts with von Bleeker, demonstrating with a vivisection of a wild hare, stimulating its muscles with electricity and making its leg twitch on the little table. Madness, too, could be an impulse of the brain, correctable, something to be excised and burned in the crematory. 

_He is not insane,_ came a thought, unbidden.

Of course he was. That was why he was there. Local men had found him, badly bruised and unconscious just outside the gates of the cemetery. They had tended him and when he'd awakened, he'd launched into a frantic tirade about a rabbit and how he was late for something important, how he _had to find the rabbit_ , and, well, what else did you do with a man raving about talking animals and clocks and watches and magic doorways - 

But the thought writhed inside his mind like a fish, cold and trapped, and he thought again of those eyes, clear as day, piercing right into him, the feeling that he was on the verge of being inside someone else's brain, as if his mind were turned inside out - 

No. That was a mad thought, too. That was a mad thought and he would stamp it out. He would talk to Wildebrand and von Bleeker in the morning. Perhaps something could be done for the poor man but Victor needed to think, he needed time to think, time alone. 

He would go home and he would think. Yes. 

VII.

Jefferson drew away. Inside himself. There was a fever on his skin, and he knew it, but he slipped away, to a peace in his mind.

The fever told him that the rabbit would return.

The rabbit must return.

Victor would come back.

The fever lay on him, stretched his skin, drew him tight and fragile and wretched and weak.

Jefferson slid. In a dream once he had stood at the center of all the worlds, as if on an island in the eye of a great and terrible storm, and lightning crackled over him, and through him, and thunder pressed words to the tender flesh behind his ear, thought-words. In the dream he had stood on hard tide-packed sand and smelled salt and the strike of lightning and the dull, gritty scent of magic, of things long enchanted and meant to stay that way.

Beneath his fever he lay on lichen-covered rocks at the crest of a mountain, looking up at a fading blue sky, watching the stars come forth, one by one.

VIII.

Victor does not sleep.

He pores over his medical texts, repeating, as if an incantation, the names of flesh and vein and follicle. He was the best in all his classes. Some days it was if the cadavers spoke to him and him alone. Like magic. 

Not foolish parlor tricks. 

But some kind of secret thing, a language belied by the beginnings of decay, the smell that lingered in his nostrils.

Victor does not sleep - he sets his books aside, and goes to the garden, where the flagstone paths are laid out in an elaborate cross among his mother's flowers and shrubs. In the year his mother died, the garden settled strangely into its beds, a wild thing. He and Gerhardt had crouched beneath the yew hedge when father's grief became too much to bear. 

_I miss mama_ , Gerhardt whispering, in the deep thick secret scent of the needles.

A rabbit prances delicately across the path, a hop and a nose, a hop and a nose. The wind is still. It does not seem to see Victor. It does not panic. 

Victor sits on a granite bench. An untended rose bush scratches at his neck, his shirt.

The moon has half crossed the heavens by the time he rises and returns to the house.

When he sleeps again, it is beset by dreams of things that hover just beyond his reach, a world of stranger hues.

IX.

Violence comes in the morning.

Jefferson thinks it's morning. He struggles to find the time. There are long, uneven strands of daylight stretching down the hallway when the door is opened. Morning. The sun. The gray sun of this gray world, the gray light reflecting on the black blood that drips from his gasping mouth to the floor of this little gray room.

The realm-jumper's dreams don't lie.

They do not tell the truth as a man would like.

But they don't lie.

There will be blood again.

On the tender catgut strings of his fever, Jefferson seeks the magic he knows is buried at the heart of this world, presses himself to it, calls it forth. Calls it forth in the language of the lay-lines, the portals, which is heat, sweat, blood, will, and want. Call and listen. Call and wait. 

Call, and wait.

X.

When Victor returns to the asylum a decision has been made in his absence.

"He is not your patient, Doctor."

"You asked me to evaluate him, Master Doctor, I - I have hardly had a chance - "

The strange thick coldness settling in the soft places, beneath his ribs. The drying of his tongue to the roof of his mouth. 

"He's had a fever. We've tried a cold sheet pack, and it hasn't worked. The man's gone, as far as I'm to estimate."

"Master Doctor, please."

Wildebrand gave him a look of pleading. Eichenholz, the Master Doctor, administrator of the men's wards, looked merely tired and surly, a light peppering of stubble on his loose cheeks.

"I have written the orders, Frankenstein."

The Master Doctor has wrenched his title from him, like a slap, eyeing him with his pale gaze as if Victor is a recalcitrant child resisting some necessary unpleasantness.

"You ought to be pleased, Victor," Wildebrand says, a small and earnest smile playing on his lips. He can call the young doctors by their first names. He is allowed; he is kind. "Another jar for your collection."

"He's in hydro," Eichenholz continues, "we'll keep him there, but if he continues, the orders stand."

"Master Doctor - the procedure is still experimental, many of the patients have died during the operation - "

Eichenholz does not look up from his papers, does not even peer over the wire rims of his glasses. Wildebrand looks disquieted - either by his favorite student's attitude, or something else. 

"A consequence. For progress. You understand, young Doctor. Of all people, you understand."

Victor knows that he should understand. That men die in the name of progress, every day. Men are slaughtered in battle in the name of advancing the civilized world. Why should men not die for the cause of science, of life itself? 

But he saw the eyes of that man. He saw fear and torment and confusion but he saw clarity there, too, and purpose, and good strength.

As he bows shortly and backs from the Master Doctor Eichenholz's office, Victor makes his own decision. He thinks it is a fine one. He may lose his position at the asylum. He may be castigated, cast out. 

But he may well be right.

XI.

Faceless persons, none of whom are the rabbit, or friends, or even barely kind, have stripped him, bound him tightly in cold sheets and left him with his fever, which does not break. They have sunk him in icewater tubs. He still sweats. They have lain him naked on a bed without a sheet.

He shivers. And he sweats.

He closes his eyes, and when he opens them something is wrong.

Jefferson turns his head and sees the rabbit, Victor, in perfect focus, speaking with a blur of a person, and then coming to his bed, and touching his throat at the pulse point. Something in Victor's eyes stutters then, and he blinks, shakes himself, looks down. Does not pull away.

Something is right. Something here.

"I don't know how you know my name," Victor whispers to him, his voice all dark and urgent like the flight of mad birds, "but I don't know yours. Tell me."

"Jefferson." 

"Jefferson," the rabbit says, and his voice rolls over Jefferson hard as the icewater bath. It strikes him, not as a fierce blow, but as an embrace. "Listen to me, if you are not mad, listen, because - " Victor pauses here, brow furrowed. " - the ward doctor has signed an order that you will be operated on, your brain - " here, Victor takes his fingers and places them at Jefferson's temple, " - and I know that you will die if they do."

Jefferson feels a dozen things, like braids of rope and leather and the pulse of blood in fine veins, come together inside him, sharp as the riding edge of a falcon's wing. He feels the hard truth of the rabbit's words, remembers the dream, which was the metal table, and the blade, and the wide eyes, and the darkness like the blood on the floor.

"Listen to me," Victor says, very close indeed, "if you are not mad, I will get you out of here. I will help you."

At this range, still trembling at the edge of fever, Jefferson can all but see the unspoken things in Victor's eyes, fierce passion, fierce honor. Terror. A panicked trust in something blind. The rabbit doesn't believe him but can't help believing it all the same.

"If - " Jefferson struggles, " - if - you believe I am n-not mad, and I'm n-not - "

Victor nods. 

XII.

The man, who is a man with a name whose name is Jefferson, who is alive and lucid past the fever, who speaks of mad things that cannot be true but who's to say, really, what cannot be true anymore?

Not long ago, no one would have believed that you could bear open a man's flesh without pain to him, without him even remembering. It would have been a miracle on the order of God. 

But a man in another country had done just that, and now everyone had taken up the practice.

Jefferson looks up at him with dark eyes, as large and earnest as ever Gerhardt's were, beneath the yew and the holly, when father struck out at them in his sorrow, when they missed mama so terribly.

"Lie still, my friend," Victor says. "Lie still, as if you were dead."

Jefferson stills himself, goes boneless into the thin and sweat-stained mattress. Victor stays for several long moments, listening. 

He turns to the attendants. "Gentlemen, if you please, a sheet. This man has passed. The shock and the fever must have stopped his heart."

If Victor had not stopped praying the day mama died, he would be praying now.

The attendants shrug, and bring him a sheet from the cart in the hall, and Victor drapes it over Jefferson with a hand on his shoulder and hope - 

The attendants help him lift Jefferson - who does a startling and hefty job of playing dead - to a gurney, and Victor insists he haul it himself to the morgue, which, beneath the vast structures of the asylum, is close to 400 metres down a windowless tunnel. Victor has all the time in the world to pause, to listen. If Dr. Von Bleeker is in pathology, there will be music playing off a phonograph. Von Bleeker is fond of opera. There is no music. 

In the morgue, Victor bends to Jefferson's still form.

"Come on, get up, I'll find you some clothes."

In the morgue they keep the articles from the dead, indigent and otherwise. There is some clothing taken from the belongings of patients who died and left no relations. Victor finds something suitable, and allows Jefferson the space to dress. The man is still woozy with a fever, but he moves with a fluid purpose, a strange and otherworldly grace, though his face is flushed and his hair damp.

"And now, my friend?" Jefferson says, his voice hoarse and ghostlike, as if Victor were seeing only a shadow of who he truly is. Victor is glad there is a shadow; it means there is something there to cast it.

XIII.

"And now?" Victor pauses. "And now we walk out of here like ordinary men. There is an exit from the basement into the asylum grounds, toward the dairy and the road to the pauper's field."

"The - " Jefferson tries to hold the term in his mind. What do they call it here. What is it. Dancing outside his vision. " - the graves, the - "

"Cemetery?" Victor frowns at him. 

Yes. Yes, that's the word. "The gate - "

"My colleagues told me - " the rabbit takes his elbow, leads him out of the cold room that smells like late autumn and faintly of blood, looking quickly down the tunnel. " - that you were found in the cemetery, talking about rabbits."

Through the heavy wooden door and out into the sun, where the smell and the noise and the sight of the world assaults his senses, where the sun is bleeding down in the west, where the tall grass is waving, where there is a packed dirt road leading deep into the trees. Where the sun is warm and the air smells sweetly of grass and strongly of animals. 

"Yes," Jefferson says, and he follows and he stumbles slightly, brushing against Victor. "Will you think I'm mad, too?"

"Would you mind if we got to my father's house before I made that judgement?"

There is a wickedness, a mischief in Victor's voice, and Jefferson wants to laugh but he feels, when his lips part, as if all the blood and sense leaves him in a rush, and he sways on his feet. The fever still creeps at the edges of his vision, and eases only slightly when Victor's hand touches his bare arm.

"You're still quite ill, my friend. You - " Victor stops, and kicks a little at the stony ruts of the path leading into the dark trees. He looks down the road. Something there he does not want to think about, Jefferson realizes. Something that needs a well-tended track from what is called the _morgue_ , the still, cold place where the dead are kept and cut. Jefferson understands this from the whispering of the world-magic. Kept, and cut, for understanding. Jefferson would have been cut open, and kept. For understanding. 

The track. The pauper's field. 

In his mind, the vision of small square stones with small square hammered numerals.

"You're welcome to - "

Jefferson feels himself tilting with the world-axis, body cold, clammy. He feels Victor's hands grasp his shoulders.

"You must stay with me. My friend. Until you are well."

Jefferson gasps a little. At the effort of the contact. At the flare it brings to his spine, to the back of his skull in the recesses where the magic has written.

"And then, my friend?"

XIV.

Victor looks down, at the man who is half-crumpled under his hands, sick with fever and hurts untended, but still with that strangeness, that ethereal quality to his gestures, to his eyes.

"I don't know what then."

Jefferson blinks up at him. "Neither do I."

Victor feels something, not a pulse, but a live thing all the same, something not unlike when mama closed her eyes, or when he and his brother held each other during the fiercest storms, or when he came down the steps at the eastern edge of the garden to the little rock pool where fish from a far-away country swam and danced in the depths.

Something. Jefferson stands, or tries to, and stumbles against him, then seems to melt languidly into his arms.

It has been a mere span of days, since they met.

A long time ago, a tutor who recognized his talents - who watched him set the broken wings of birds, who saw him sit for hours in the garden with a notebook and pencil - had told him that he was, above all, to trust the instincts within himself, for he was no fool, and would use them wisely.

Victor's heart tells him _something._

"We'll find out then, won't we?" He says. "We'll find out, then."


End file.
